SIGNIFICANT OTHERS AND THEIR EXPECTATIONS: TO MEASURE ...

Reprinted from RURAL SoCIOLOGY Volume 37, No.4, December 1972

pp. 591-622 Made in United States of America

SIGNIFICANT OTHERS AND THEIR EXPECTATIONS:

CONCEPTS AND INSTRUMENTS TO MEASURE INTER-

PERSONAL INFLUENCE ON STATUS ASPIRATIONS'

Archibald O. Haller

Department of Rural Sociology, University of Wisconsin, Madison

Joseph Woelfel

Department of Sociology, University of Illinois, Urbano-Champaign

ABSTRACT The significant other (SO) is the most precise concept available for use in assessing interpersonal influences on orientational variables. A special set of concepts and corresponding questionnaire- instruments are developed to permit (I) identification of SOs in a given behavior domain, by means of SO Elicitors, and (2) measurement of the variables by which SOs influence individual goal orientations, by means of SO Expectation Elicitors. SO Elicitors use data from the focal individual to identify spe~ cific persons who have told him about himself (definers) or have exempli~ fied (acted as models of) a social role (or more generally, object) or his relationship to it. A given SO may be both definer and model. Four filter categories (meanings) of social roles were inferred from content analysis of responses to depth interviews and from previous research: intrinsic function, extrinsic function, intrinsic' nature, and extrinsic nature. SOs are identified by determining a person's definers and models for filter categories for each type of object. Expectations are elicited directly from named SOs. SOs may hold expectations as to how the focal person (or others like him) would behave with respect to an object or as to how much importance he (or others like him) would attach to a type of filter category for the object. From definer SOs, expectations regarding the focal person himself are elicited; from model SOs who are not definers, expectations regarding youth in general are elicited. Concepts and instruments are tested on educational and occupational orientation data; reliability and validity of SO Elicitors and SO Expectation Elicitors have been checked, and their joint validity has been tested. Partial regression (with seven key variables controlled) of SOs' mean educational expectation levels on a

youth's educational aspiration level yields f3 = .46, and of SOs'- mean occu~

pational expectation levels on a youth's occupational aspiration level yields

f3 = .52. The analysis demonstrates the validity of the concepts and instru~

ments in one domain of behavior and suggests their potential usefulness in others.

1 The research reported here was supported by the U. S. Office of Education, by the University of Wisconsin College of Agricultural and Life Sciences for North Central Regional Research Committee NC86, by funds to the Institute for Research 'on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin provided by the Office of Economic Opportunity pursuant to the provisions of the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, by the Research Committee of the Graduate School of the University of Wisconsin,

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592 Rural Sociology, Vol. 37, No.4, December 1972

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Two main concepts are used to indicate the persons who are most influential in the life of an individual. These are the significant other (Sullivan, 1940; Cottrell and Foote, 1952; Stryker, 1964) and the reference group (Hyman and Singer, 1968). Both acknowledge that a person's behavior is influenced by others in his cognitive field while allowing for vast differences in the amount of influence of such people. The reference group concept is troublesome to the research worker interested in precise assessments of the effects of others on the person be? cause its unit term, group, presumes multiperson influence, which does not always exist. It directs attention away from individual influence, whereas for many-perhaps most-interpersonal research questions, it is precisely the question of which persons exert how much influence which is of most importance. The significant other concept promises to be the more flexible for analytical purposes. Yet to date the latter concept has not been used much in research. To make it useful, the sociOlogist must (I) find a way to identify the particular persons who influence an individual's cognitions (attitudes, aspiration levels, values, opinions, beliefs), (2) determine the variables describing the modes of influence of the other on the person, and (3) assess the individual and/ or aggregate effects of these variables on the person. Clearly, this is one of the most important tasks of an empirical science of sociology. yet research on this concept is almost nonexistent (Couch and Murray, 1964).

This article is a report on recent research attempting to attain the general objectives listed in the preceding paragraph. In research de? volving from insightful but nonrigorous conceptual schemes, the researcher often finds that he must modify to some extent the intent of the original theorist. In this case, Sullivan and others seem to have thought that exceptionally influential others exert their effects on the whole cognitive structure of the person. However true this may turn ot.:lt to be in the long run. the researcher cannot assume it. More specifically. we report on new ways to identify significant others in one area of attitudes (status aspiration), and to measure their influence on the individual (Haller, Woelfel, and Fink, 1969). If, after many such projects have been conducted in other areas of behavior and it is learned that some others do in fact exert their influence on all the elements of a person's cognitive system, the early theorists will have been vindicated; if not, the range of applicability of the concept will have been specified.

and by the Graduate Research Committee of the University of Illinois. We wish to thank William H. Sewell and Alejandro Portes for their comments on an earlier version of this article, as well as Edward L. Fink, Helcio U. Saraiva, George Ohlendorf. and Mrs. Lylas Brown for various other types of aid.

SIGNIFICANT OTHERS' EXPECTATIONS? Haller and Woelfel 593

PROBLEM The problem of measuring the influence of significant others is really two problems: (I) detecting the exact significant others for any person, and (2) measuring whatever it is that these ?thers do, or are, that r~n. ders them influential. To be most useful. Instruments for measunng significant other influence must be val~d, .r.eliable, economical, and practicable; they must (a) detect each Slgnlfic~n~ other (SO) for any person, and (b) directly measure those charactenstIcs or behaVIOr of the SO by which his influence is transmitted to that pers~m. Although several ingenious and worthwhile instruments meas~nng aspec~s of significant other influence have been devise~, ~p until now no smgle instrument has been able to meet all these criteria (Couch and Murray, 1964; Stewart, 1955; Mulford, 1955; Slocum, 1967; Kemper, 1963; Sewell, Haller, and Portes, 1969).

This problem has been a particular handicap to research o?lhe

educational and occupational attainment process. A decade a?o It was suggested that parental influence (Bordua, 1960) and peer .mfluence (Haller and Butterworth, 1960) were major sources of edu~atlOnal and occupational aspirations. But the full extent and mechamsms of such interpersonal influence are not yet known, partly beca~se of the lack of suitable measurement devices. It was to help meet thiS need that the Wisconsin Significant Other Battery (WISOB) was constructed.

THEORY Although frequently (Merton, 1957:215; Rose, 1962:11, 141). at? tributed to Mead (1934), the term "significant other" was actuallr comed by Harry Stack Sullivan (1940) and has a fairly specific meanmg. As Cottrell and Foote (1952: 190-191) suggest, "The correspondence. be? tween Mead and Sullivan leaves off at the point of the generalized other. For Mead, whose lifespan came a generation before Sullivan's the social world was a fairly wholesome web; the others from whom one took his conception of himself were in substantial agree~en~. Hence the 'generalized other' of Mead's social psychology. In SullIv:m s time, and ours, the community has been fractured. The generalized other has broken down into clusters of significant others."

Implicit in this use of the term "sig?i~i~ant other" i~ the not~on .'~f segmentalized influence, with the poSSibility open of dlff~rent slgnlfI. cant others influencing different areas of the self?conceptlOn, or even different attitudes. Accordingly, the WISOB was designed in separate versions for significant others' influence regarding education and

regarding occupation. In addition to our initial assumption that significant others are (or

may be) attitude.specific, the WISOB is based on three key assuml'ti~n.s about attitudes: (I) attitudes are constructed of parts, so that a slgnlfI-

594 Rural Sociology, Vol. 37~ No.4, December 1972

cant other may influence a component of an attitude and thus the entire attitude; (2) attitudes and the components of attitudes themselves rest on larger cognitive structures (filter categories) and conseM quently may be modified indirectly by modification of these larger structures; and (3) influence over attitudes, their components, or the larger structures on which they depend may be exerted either (a) by persons and/or groups who communicate norms, expectations, or other seUM or object-defining information to an individual through interaction, or (b) by persons who stand as points of cognitive reference but do not interact with the subject.

In more concrete terms, by the first assumption we mean that an attitude consists of a relationship of a person to an object or a set of objects, and that the whole attitude may be changed by changing the person's definition of either himself or the object or both.

The second assumption follows the interactionist tradition and presumes that the confrontation between person and object is always mediated by some symbolic structure (Kuhn, 1964:8). In this sense, it is always a conception which is the object of an attitude. Forming a conception of an object, no matter how vague, is a classification procedure; one forms a conception of what an object is by relating it to other objects of his experience, by associating it with some objects and differentiating it from others. This means placing it in a category of objects thought to be in some sense the same. These categories we call "filter categories," in that they "filter" a person's perception of the objects within them. Clearly, the individual's orientation toward the category governs his orientation toward the objects within that category. In searching out significant others (SOs), then it is necessary to find not only those who directly influence the attitude in question, but also persons who have influenced the filter categories upon which the individual's definitions of self and object depend.

The third assumption reflects the distinction apparently originated by Kelley (1952:410--414), between (a) (in our words, not his) those who communicate such things as nonns, expectations or definitions of behavior, objects, and self-conception, and (b) those who in some way exemplify an attitude, occupational or educational position, or the individual self. For operational purposes the distinction we make between the two is based on the medium of influence: the former (whom we call "definers") communicate, via direct interaction, definitions 6f ego, objects, and their appropriate interrelationships; the latter (whom we call "models") are observed by ego to have some attribute, characteristic, position, or attitude which by example defines ego, the object in question, or the relationship between the two.

We define a significant other (SO) for status attainment as a person, known to the focal individual, who either through direct interaction (a definer) or by example (a model) provides information which influ-

SIGNIFICANT OTHERS' EXPECTATIONS? Haller and l'Voelfel

595

ences the focal individual's conception of himself in relation to educational or occupational roles or influences his conception of such ~oles (a conception of an object). We thus have four classes of SOs: .defmers for self, definers for object, models for self, and models for object;. and each of these may function for educational roles or for occupatIOnal roles. Any person who functions in anyone of these ways is an SO for the focal person. Further, anyone SO may function in any .or all of these modes. In the ensuing discussions we assume that the hIgher t~e number of these modes by which the SO influences ego, the greater IS his significance for ego.

THE INSTRUMENTS

Our SO instruments, called the Wisconsin Significant Other Battery (WISOB, or simply the Battery) are of four classes: those desi?n~ted to identify (I) educational and (2) occupational SOs (called SlgmfIcant Other Elicitors or SOEs) and those designed to measure the (3) ed,:cational and (4) occupational expectations by which the SO.s exer~ t.hen influence on the youth (called Significant Other ExpectatIOn ElIcitors

or EEs).

Significant Other Elicitors (SOEs)

A satisfactory instrument to identify a person's SOs must cue him to think of the filter categories which he uses to define the object in question and himself, and then ask him about who provides information to him, either by word or example, about those categories. To cue a person to think of his filter categories implies that the filter categories are known in advance, however. The first step in developing the Battery was to find out the most common filter categories for education and occupation. Sixty-one detailed tape-recorded interviews, 31 with a selected sample of Wisconsin high school students and 30 from a sample of the significant others whose names they provided, yielded a list of several hundred words describing filter categories for the objects, education and occupation. The filter categories for each student's definition of education and occupation were separated and were classified on a common sense basis into four broad categories, presumably applicable to any social role, as follows:

1. The intrinsic nature of the object, or what is essentially connected to it (for example, installing pipe is essentially connected with the object "plumbing")

2. The extrinsic natuTe of an object, or the attributes which are not essential to it (living in dorms is part of the extrinsic nature of the object "college education")

3. The intrinsic function or the essential purpose of an object (learning is an essential function of education)

596 Rural Sociology, Vol. 37, No.4, December 1972

4. The ext,?insic function, which refers to the ends that an object may serve which are nonetheless not essential to it (conferring high status is an extrinsic function of education)

Though subjectively determined, these categories are apparently quite pertinent. They summarize our own data quite completely. Further, they seem to be identical to the contents of the four factors identified by Gregory and Lionberger (1967) as the main dimensions of occupational attributes.

After several pretests using these categories, we formulated two fourpage questionnaire instruments, the Occupational and the Educational Significant Other Elicitors. These elicit the names of a youth's SOs. Both are rapid-administration questionnaires for use in either individual or group testing situations, and may be administered by nontechnical personnel. Specimen questions from each section of each SOE are presented in Appendix I.

Each of the pages contains questions about one mode of influence. Four questions. one for each of the filter categories listed above, are asked on each page. Several blanks are provided so that the youth may list a number of names under each filter category. If a person is named in answer to any of the filter category questions-that is, if his name appears one or more times on a page-he is considered to be an SO for that mode. The respondent is thus provided with four different opportunities to give names of his SOs fitting anyone mode of SO influence. Page I, for example, elicits the names of the definers for object. Thus, the number of pages on which an SO's name appears represents his score as an SO. The maximum SCOfe for either educational or occupational SOs is four (the total number of modes). An SO who was maximally significant for both education and occupation would have a score of eight. Normally. we would not combine such scores. but in the area of status attainment it may be useful to do so. More elaborate scoring systems were investigated, but none was shown to be markedly superior to this simple technique. Although WISOB SOEs purport to detect only contemporaneous significant others, repeated administrations would clearly identify those SOs who remain influential across time.

Utility

Before going into a detailed analysis of the forms, we shall offer evidence regarding the promise of this approach to the identification of SOs. Although parents, peer friends, and teachers may well turn out to be SOs (Sewell, Haller, and Portes, 1969; Sewell, Haller, and Ohlendorf, 1970), we cannot safely assume that just because a person stands in one of these role relationships with a youth he is ipso facto an SO for him, nor that all SOs have such role relationships to the youth. A

SIGNIFICANT OTHERS' EXPECTATIONS? Haller and Woelfel

597

precise sample is not needed to indicate the role relationships of SOs and youth. Pretest data from one school a~e sUffi.cient .(Woelfe~, 1968). Ninety high school seniors from Eau ClaIre, Wlsconsm-6~ girls and 22 boys-filled out a long experimental form of the occupatIOnal SOE, and the relationship of each SO to the YOl1th was asce.rtam~d. In total, 619 SOs were identified, and these are theIr role relatIOnshIpS: Fathers are SOs for 75 percent and they constitute II percent of the total SOs. Mothers are SOs for 85 percent and they make up 12 percent of all SOs. Three percent of the SOs were brothers, 6 percent sisters, 13 percent other relatives, 23 percent peers of the same sex, 6 percent peers of the opposite sex, 9 percent school personnel (including counse~o.rs), 14 percent adult friends, and 5 percent friends not further specIfIed. These data, crude as they are, clearly show the wide scattering of SOs am~ng persons of various role relationships to the youth. Vet they also proVIde support for those who, for research' purposes, would assess significant others' influence by measuring average expectations of those who are parents, friends, and teachers of a given youth (Sewell, Haller, and Portes, 1969; Sewell, Haller, and Ohlendorf, 1970).

Other infonnal data from various pretests are also pertinent. Youth have been found who have no SOs regarding education and occupation; this was determined by direct, taped interviews. At the opposite extreme, one girl was found who listed 56 different education~1 and occupational SOs. This indicates that youth vary enormously m the number of persons influencing t?eir. educational .and ?ccupational orientations. Moreover, SOs of dIfferIng role relatIonshIps to youth tend to have different levels of influence (as indicated by the number of modes which i';f1uenced the youth). SO fathers tend to have a high level of influence; SO mothers, SO peer friends, and SO school personnel tend to have a low level (Woelfel, 1968:70). Some particular individuals are SOs for many persons, as, for example, was a nun in one of our schools. In sum, there are several influence patterns of SOs: (I) individual SOswho influence only one youth but do so at a high level, (2) classes of SOs who individually may have only a little influence on a person but whose numbers may make their net influence great, and

(3) individual SOs who have little influence on anyone youth but have

a profound net effect because they influence many.

Significant Dthe>? Expectation Elicitors (EEs)

Once the significant others for any individual have been identified, a

complete description of the interpersonal influence process still requires a specification of that which the significant others transmit to

that individual. This task is the one for which the WISOB Significant Other Expectation Elicitors have been designed. The EEs were developed simultaneously with the SOEs, are based on the same 61 initial

598 Rural Sociology, Vol. 37, No.4, December 1972

Object

Subject of the instrument

of the Specific (named) youth

Youth in general~

instrument forms administered to definers

forms administered to models

Instruments measuring the signifi- Instruments measuring the signifi-

Attainment cant other's expectations l"egarding cant other's expectations regarding

levels

attainment levels for specific

attainment levels for youth in

(forms use youth

general

hierarchial

response categories)

Level of occupational prestigeb (form 04)

Level of formal education

Level of occupational prestige (fonn 02)

Level of formal education

(foml E4)

(form E2)

Filter categories for attainment levels (forms use Likert scales)

Instruments measuring the signifi- Instruments measuring the signifi-

cant other's expectations regarding cant other's expectations regarding

the importance of filter categories the importance of filter categories

for specific youth

for youth in general

Importance of occupational filters (form 05)

Importance of educational filters (form E5)

Importance of occupational filters (fonn 01)

1m portance of educational filters (fonn El)

Figure 1. Paradigm for Significant Other Expectation Elicitor instruments

Note: Two instruments not measuring expectations were included in the original battery (forms 03 and E3). They measure the importance which SO personally attributes to each of the filter categories.

a These instmments elicit the expectation levels which the SO believes appropriate for youth. They use a rOle-taking approach. Forms 02 and E2 do so by asking him what he would choose if he were a youth; thus he takes the role of a class of people. FOlnlS 01 and El do so by asking him about the importance of each filter to people in general; thus he takes the role of the generalized other.

b There are two versions of this fonn, one worded for SOs of boys and the other for SOs of girls.

interviews and theoretical presumptions, and are meant as a complement to the SOEs. Most simply and generally, just as the SOEs operated by asking a focal individual whom he talked to or used as a model about filter categories, the EEs operate by asking the SOs what they expect of a particular youth (definers) or what they expect of youth in general (models). Although the instruments are very simple, the fact that slightly different versions of each have been provided (depending on the exact classification of the SO in question) makes them somewhat difficult to explain concisely. There are eight EEs, which are represented schematically in Figure l.

Four EEs are for specific youth who are named. These fonns are administered to SOs identified as definers; in all such cases the SO has directly communicated with the youth about education and/or occupa-

SIGNIFICANT OTHERS' EXPECTATIONS. Haller and ?Woelfel 599

tion; we assume, therefore, that SO has formed expectations for this specific youth. Four are for models who are not definers; in these cases the youth has named the SO but because he fails to indicate that SO has ever told him anything about himself (the youth) in relation to education or occupation, we cannot even assume that SO knows the youth, and we measure the expectations SO has for youth in general. Looking at the figure'S other main axis, we see that there are four instruments whose objects are attainment levels (levels of the occupational prestige hierarchy or levels of formal education), and four whose objects are filter categories for attainment (the same filter categories defined earlier). Another way of saying this is that eight instruments are generated by a 2 X 2 X 2 classification. These are the following: First are two classes of subjects of the instruments, specific youth whose names are provided, and youth in general. The fonner are for youth who did and the latter are for youth who did not indicate having talked with the SO whom they identified. Second are two classes of objects of the instruments. These are attainment levels and filter categories for attainment levels. The former are hierarchical representations of levels of occupational prestige or levels of formal education. The latter are Likert scales of the importance of each of the four filter categories. Third and last are two classes of objects of the expectations, formal education and occupation. Specimen questions from each of the eight EEs are presented in Appendix 2. These are keyed to Figure l.

Our main concern in this article is with the four instruments measuring expectations with regard to attainment rather than with those measuring the importance of filter categories. This is because we presume that an SO's levels of status expectations have a more immediate effect on the youth's levels of status aspirations than do an SO's beliefs about the importance of the filter categories.

Both occupational expectation instruments (02 and 04, Figure 1) are variants of the Occupational Aspiration Scale (OAS), an instrument whose validity and reliability have been well documented elsewhere (Haller and Miller, 1963). The OAS measures the level of the occupational prestige hierarchy that the person has taken as a goal for himself. Most present modifications consist of simple variations in the personal pronouns, which change only the person referred to; they do not upset the overall pattern of occupational prestige response alternatives. Like the OAS, the occupational expectation fonns use 80 nonredundant occupational titles from a 1945 NORC study (Hodge et aI., 1964). All 80 are ranked by prestige and were divided into eight groups. Each group consists of ten occupational titles which systematically span the entire prestige range. (That is, one group will include the highest, the 9th highest, the 17th highest and so on down to the 73rd highest; the

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